[throwaway110111]

Isn't it possible they are not using AWS? There are plenty of game hosting services that own their own hardware.

Even if they are using AWS (which personally seems like a poor decision for this kind of use case), I don't think your pricing comparison is fair. On demand pricing is the most expensive way to rent AWS servers. Reserved instances, dedicated hosts, and savings plans can cut the cost you quoted by ~70%. By your calculations that's 100 players for ~$33/month.

[throwaway110]

Yes, it is possible that they do not use AWS, but thats not my point. If you can offer a price which is a fraction of AWS' price (or for that matter of any other major cloud provider), why bother with gaming? Just sell your capacity 11x cheaper, whereas this is a lower bound for this factor. They should be able to sell it for even less.

Owning hardware does not make it necessarily cheaper. Most often to the contrary.

So by your approximation they still make -$23/month?

Either way, we offer a solid Factorio Server Hosting Service, where you do not have to bother with capacity limitations, resulting lags or an awful configuration panel. We solve this problems and we offer it for $2.5/player/month. If you want a smooth gaming experience when coming home from a stressful workday, we are the right choice. If you dont care for about the aspects mentioned above and you want to pay a few cents less per month, you should probably us a different game server host.

Our focus is quality of service.